The armored dinosaur fossil preserved in exquisite detail unearthed in a western Canadian oil sand mine highlights the new daunting challenges facing the theory of evolution.
This stunningly preserved fossil is shattering long-standing paradigms. “The more I look at it,” said Michael Greshko, science writer for National Geographic, “the more mind-boggling it becomes.”
In 1835, the Galapagos Islands piqued a young British naturalist’s endless curiosity. Equipped with technologies not much beyond a clock, compass, measuring tape, scale, thermometer, clinometer, and microscope, the experience eventually propelled Charles Darwin to propose a new world-shattering theory of evolution in his 1859 book–The Origin of Species.
Since then, technological advances have revolutionized scientific investigations upending Darwin’s finches with a new Galapagos icon of evolution.
Ancient fungal clues recently discovered off the coast of South Africa further stretch the boundaries of the theory of evolution. Birger Rasmussen, a geology professor at the Western Australian School of Mines, was drilling at a depth of 2,600 feet for the purpose of dating the ancient submarine lava in the Ongeluk Formation estimated to be 2.4 billion years old in Northern Cape Province of South Africa when he unexpectedly noticed what appeared to be microfilaments (pictured).
“I was startled to find a dense mesh of tangled fossilized microbes,” Rasmussen said in an interview with LiveScience writer Jerry Redfern last month. To Marlowe Hood writing for Phys.org, Rasmussen recalled that “My attention was drawn to a series of petrified gas bubbles, and when I increased the magnification of the microscope, I was startled.” The bubbles were “filled with hundreds of exquisitely preserved filaments that just screamed ‘life.’” In the words of Science Alert writer Peter Dockrill, “It’s raising some big evolutionary questions.”
To think that shape affects function – or form follows function – is an implicit assertion used ubiquitously throughout the evolution industry. This assumption, however, is untested. As an evolutionary biologist, Fouad El Baidouri (pictured right below) of the University of Lincoln, UK, explains –
“Despite a few pioneering attempts to link bacterial form and function, functional morphology is largely unstudied in prokaryotes [microbes].”
In the native land of Charles Darwin, for the first time, the Royal Society is challenging evolution academia to develop a new theory of biological evolution. As the original science organization in Western Civilization, the Society explains the problem with today’s most popular current theory:
“Developments in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields have produced calls for revision of the standard theory of evolution, although the issues involved remain hotly contested.”
